Documentation Challenges in Practice: Art Collection Barcoding Project

In this week’s blog, our Art Collection Documentation Assistant Gaby Cortes discusses some of the challenges involved in auditing the Art Collection and how the addition of barcode labels is helping to tackle this.

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Giving Decorated Paper a Home … Loose-leaf Material

In this post, Technician Robyn Rogers discusses her bespoke mounting and rehousing of loose-leaf papers from the University’s decorated paper collection. Robyn’s first post about working through the collection’s bound volumes can be seen here. If you are interested in learning more about the historic uses, production and trade of decorated paper, you can visit the online exhibition on this collection, curated by Elizabeth Quarmby Lawrence here.

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An Explorer’s Legacy: The Journey of the John Rae Collection

As part of ongoing work on the University’s historic loans, Collections Registrar, Morven Rodger, investigates the history and provenance of the University’s John Rae collection.

In July 1926, the University Court agreed to lend the “John Rae Collection of Arctic and Other Relics” to the Royal Museum of Scotland. Almost a century later, The Royal Museum is now the National Museum of Scotland, and John Rae’s items remain on loan, but how and why did the University come to have these items in the first place?

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Managing Collections: Edinburgh College of Art

One of our largest and most complex collections is that of the Edinburgh College of Art (hereafter named ECA). Transferred to Heritage Collections in 2012 following the merger of the College and University in 2011, the collection spans artwork, objects and paper archives. The paper archives alone total around 200 metres in volume, or well over 1,000 boxes and folders of material.

As a result, it has become one of the largest that requires rehousing and appraising. It is so large that Jasmine and I have had to undertake processing the collection in stages. To read more about appraisal and what it entails, check out last year’s blog by clicking this link.

Colour photograph within a strongroom. The floor, shelving and ceiling are white, and the lighting is fluorescent. The shelving rows run down the left and right of the image, and on the shelves are cardboard boxes, lever arch files, loose papers and assorted documents.

Two of the five rows that hold the Edinburgh College of Art archives.

 

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Art Collection Audit Spotlight: Edinburgh College of Art Works on Paper

In this week’s blog our Art Collection Documentation Assistant Gaby Cortes discusses the work she has been undertaking for the first phase of a campus-wide audit of the Art Collection, highlighting our student artworks on paper from the Edinburgh College of Art.

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Conserving calligraphy: preparing Esther Inglis’ manuscripts for digitisation

In this post book conservator Amy Baldwin talks about the conservation work undertaken on volumes appearing in the upcoming online exhibition “Rewriting the script: the works and words of Esther Inglis”.

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